


Naming the Land

by Antosha



Category: Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: 50-year-old Virgin, Book: Tehanu, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Het, Middle Aged Sex, Middle Aged Virgins, Missing Scene, Sparrowhawk Being Sparrowhawk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:42:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24356011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antosha/pseuds/Antosha
Summary: They lay that night on the hearthstones and there Tenar taught Ged the mystery that the wisest man could not teach him. (Tenar/Ged, Tehanu missing scene)
Relationships: Ged/Tenar (Earthsea)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 26





	Naming the Land

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday, aberforths_rug!
> 
> Thanks to scriblix for the beta!

_The silence was like a presence between them. She lifted her head and look at him.  
_

“Well,” she said, “which bed shall I sleep in, Ged? The child's, or yours?”

He drew breath. He spoke low. “Mine, if you will.”

“I will.”

The silence held him. She could see the effort he made to break from it. “If you'll be patient with me,” he said.

“I have been patient with you for twenty-five years,” she said. She looked at him and began to laugh. “Come—come on, my dear—Better late than never! I'm only an old woman…. Nothing is wasted, nothing is ever wasted. You taught me that.” She stood up and he stood; she put out her hands, and he took them.

They embraced, and their embrace became close.  
  


As lip found lip and hip found hip, Tenar was touched to discover that Ged's caresses were as timid and uninformed as those of a boy who had not yet received his true name.

At first she guided his hands, taking pleasure in their tremor as they found new territory. Then, like a good teacher with a willing pupil, she began to tell him the names of things, and the names came reverently from his tongue even as the things they named rose and parted beneath his fingers.

At last her shift joined the rest of her clothing beside them, and she stood unclothed before him. Ged's eyes were still and dark. “Disappointed?” she asked, surprised to find that she retained enough vanity to care.

“I have beheld the face of Elfarran the Fair,” he said, or seemed to say, for his voice was all but inaudible. “Yet I have never beheld such beauty as I do now.”

Tenar blushed, her pale body pinkening from hip to scalp in the way that had always made Flint laugh, but Ged did not laugh; his face was as still and solemn as it had been when they had watched the Place of the Tombs crumble. A flutter passed through her belly. “You have seen…?”

Then he smiled, sadly. “It was she whom I called up on the night that I loosed the dark thing that gave me these.” His fingers rose to four white scars upon his cheek, and her fingers rose to meet them, tracing the pale marks on his wood-dark skin, the imperfections that had always cast his own beauty into such sharp relief.

She removed his clothing, following the Shadow's traces down to the center of his chest. She had seen these scars before upon _Lookfar_ , but had not known their source then, nor wanted to be seen to be looking.

She pressed her lips at the spot between his nipples where the scars all met.

He shivered as she kissed her way down his lean belly to the head of the hairy trail that led down into his breaches. As she reached new landmarks, she named them, sanctifying the holy land of his body with her lips and tongue.

Slowly, her mouth still upon him, she began to undo the points that held his breaches up, and his knees gave way instead. Tenar laughed, but Ged looked quite abashed.

As she knelt and began to pull down his leggings, however, he did manage a small grin.

When he was naked beneath her, they both gazed silently at the part of him that he had ignored to the benefit of his magery. It would be ignored no more.

She reached out and named it— _pen,_ it is called in Hardic, and _awato_ in Kargish. “This is the first pizzle that I ever saw,” Tenar murmured, her fingers finding its breadth, testing its length. When he looked her quizzically, curiosity overcoming even sensation, she laughed again; Ged was always Ged. “When we sailed those weeks together, do you think I never snuck a peek? I, who had spent my life among girls and women?”

Now he smiled and gave in to the sensation for a moment. His eyes still closed he said, “I peeked too, you know. I looked at the beautiful young women beside me as she slept or washed or passed water, at the breast or quim that revealed itself.” Here he used the Hardic terms that she had just taught him. “I asked myself how it was that I could see your beauty and yet not desire you. I had been taught that it was in the nature of mages not to crave the pleasures of the flesh, and yet at the time, I wondered whether that was a virtue or a failing.”

Gently she squeezed his dancers, his testicles. “And what do you think now?”

“I think,” he groaned, “that wise men can be great fools.”

Tenar considered the _pen_ before her. Ged was a man of some fifty-odd years, and yet it was reacting to her touch as fervently as a young man's. Could she chance an early ejaculation? If she fondled him to release, would he rise again? This was a coupling that she had wished for through most of her adult life. She did not wish either of them to be disappointed with their first taste of each other's love.

“ _Erlack_ ,” she said, leaning forward and taking the dark red head of him into her mouth. She heard him gasp, attempting even in his surprise and transport to repeat back the word, before he bucked and spewed over her tongue and teeth.

Flint had been a wonderful man, but an unimaginative lover. He had allowed her to unleash him so during the early days of their marriage on nights when she was too sore to couple with him in a more conventional manner. He allowed it because it felt good. But as they grew older together, he demurred, saying, “Don't want to waste what I've got.”

Ged seemed unlikely to say any such thing. As she coughed and swallowed, beaming up at him, his face was so full of wonder that she couldn't help be burst into spluttering laughter.

“I didn't know!” he crowed—remembering only afterward that Therru was sleeping in the next room, biting his lips to quiet himself.

“Didn't know?”

“I… I've woken the past months to find my bedroll wet in the mornings from time to time, and I knew what it must be, but… I had no idea—” His mouth found hers and the giddiness spilled out of him and into her as explosively as his seed had done. Tenar found herself on her back, his wiry body against her soft one, felt her teats harden and her womb flower open so quickly that she too was giddy, lightheaded. She began to whisper his name, his true name— _Ged, Ged, Ged—_ as his hands and body moved over hers. She rolled against him, and a sudden twitch against her thigh told her that she had made the right choice by taking him into her mouth; they were not done for the evening.

Just as she expected to begin drawing him up into her body, Ged instead began kissing his way awkwardly down her chest and round belly, just as she had done. Tenar's breath caught as he gazed down between her legs. “ _Erlack_?” he asked.

Numb, she nodded, though she was not certain that it was in fact called the same thing. It did not matter. The first touch of his tongue against her pearl, the first pass along the petals of her flower were enough to assure her that this was good.

Penthe had talked about this, had talked about playing games with the other novices, _tickles and tongues_ , and Tenar—Arha—had scowled in disapproval as Penthe had no doubt intended her to do, but later, in her chamber, Tenar had tried to imagine what that must be like, tried to imagine how it must feel.

It felt wonderful.

It had never occurred to Flint to do this, and it had never occurred to Tenar to ask.

Nor had Fold, the second son of Fan the Weaver in Re Albi, her first lover and the one whose caresses had convinced her that her study, her life were to be more than dry words, no matter how true or powerful. He had had a sweet mouth, and clever fingers, but _this_!

“Fingers!” hissed Tenar, pulling Ged's hand from where it was groping her breast, pushing the fingers _inside_.

In twenty years of marriage, Flint had given her a feeling like this—like a wave breaking against a shore after a thousand-mile journey—perhaps a dozen times, but never had the wave been so strong and long, and never had it been followed by afterwave after afterwave, until Tenar could not hold herself up, but flopped back against the cold stones of the floor. Panting.

“Tenar?” Ged asked, his face bowed in concern.

“ _Erlack_ ,” Tenar answered, grinning weakly and pulling him back down onto her. Lips to lips, hips to hips.

After some time embracing, but before urgency carried them away again, Ged pushed away from her and gazed down, a sad, thoughtful look on his face as it so often was. “What do you see, Ged?”

“I see my Tenar.”

Not Arha, the Eaten One, though she had at last earned that title from his tongue. Not Goha, the white spider of Gont. Not the White Lady of the Ring. “Your Tenar?”

A slight smile touched his mouth. “My Tenar.” He leaned back down and brushed his lips experimentally across her brow. Apparently, he liked the affect; when he leaned back again, the smile was broader still. “When I first saw you, you frightened me.”

“ _I_?” she laughed. “I frightened _you?_ What had the great Archmage Sparrowhawk, Master of the Masters of Roke, Dragon Lord, master of names and elements to fear from pale Tenar?”

He smirked as she listed his titles. “Your grey eyes, I think.” His face relaxed into seriousness. “You carried your power lightly, Tenar, but the Old Ones had picked an apt vessel, a strong vessel. I knew that when you came to me, there in those endless tunnels, that I was entirely at your sufferance—yours to release, either to death or life. Your power sang through the darkness—not the gaudy power of my kind, perhaps, but an abiding, deep strength nonetheless.” He leaned forward and whispered. “And you were beautiful.”

Now it was her turn to gaze, speechless. After a time, she said, “When I saw you, I was frightened too. You were alone in the tunnel, beneath me. You were trapped, and yet you seemed… _at ease._ Unhurried. Not at all like a man who…” Her gut clenched.

“Tenar?”

“I watched them, Ged. I watched men die in those tunnels…”

He waited, that same easy look on his face that she remembered from so many years before. No judgment. When she found that she could not speak, he said, “That was your role to play, Tenar; it was not you. You are not Arha.” He stroked her neck. “Just as I have gone places and done things that Hawk the Goatherd had no business doing.”

Tenar was not sure whether he meant it as a joke but she took it as such. “Like sneaking into the sacred place of the Nameless Ones to steal away their treasures?”

“And their priestess,” he answered solemnly.

“She went willingly.”

“Ah.”

She reached up and ran her hand along his bronze brow. “When I first saw you, Ged, you did not look like a man who was about to die. You looked like…” She grinned at the old forgotten image that swam back up into her mind. “Do you know the symbol of the empire, the _kore_?”

He frowned at her. “Looks sort of like a pair of tangled tadpoles?

She laughed. “Yes, it does, doesn't it? Well, it's a symbol… Our stories say that when the Old Ones walked across the Kargish lands, their multifold essence took two forms: one white and female, the other black and male. The female creates the illusion of time and life, and the male sweeps it away to bring the beginning of the new cycle.”

“That sounds… fascinating.” Ged. Always Ged.

“When I was first installed as High Priestess, my friend Penthe pulled me on a few adventures, exploring the forbidden parts of the temples. We found a room full of carvings—sculptures older than the temple, as old, perhaps as the Tombs themselves. One was clearly a _kore_ —but instead of those tadpoles, it was a man, carved roughly from black rock, and a smooth-skinned woman carved from ivory.” Tenar thought of Penthe, so full of lust and life, laughing at the sudden illumination of the sacred symbol. Penthe, whom she had not thought of in decades.

Ged licked his lips; his _pen_ jumped again against her thigh.

“It was of that sculpture that I thought as I looked down on you, dark and fearless in that fearsome place. It was of that sculpture, and of us.”

His face was very solemn now. “And how… how were these figures arranged?”

“Let me show you,” she said. Pulling him onto and into herself, she did.  
  


_They held each other so fiercely, so dearly, that they ceased knowing anything but each other. It did not matter which bed they meant to sleep in. They lay that night on the hearthstones and there Tenar taught Ged the mystery that the wisest man could not teach him.  
_

Tehanu _, “Winter,” p. 211_


End file.
